Writers have their special places, and places have their special writers. In this sense, Edwidge Danticat and Haiti belong to each other. In book after book — from the novel “Breath, Eyes, Memory” (1994) and the short-story collection “Krik? Krak!” (1996) to the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir “Brother, I’m Dying” (2007) — Danticat has explored the history and culture of her homeland, which she depicts as a complex world full of the contradictions of generosity and poverty, beauty and disaster.

In her new novel, "Claire of the Sea Light," Danticat gives us a 7-year-old heroine, Claire, a little girl whose mother died while giving birth to her. The story is activated when her father, a struggling fisherman in the small coastal town of Ville Rose, persuades a well-to-do fabric vendor, Madame Gaëlle, to take Claire to raise as her own. The fisherman believes this to be an improvement for Claire, but she isn't convinced — which helps explain why she vanishes just before the transfer of custody is to occur.

Printers Row Journal caught up with Danticat, 44, at her home in Miami. Here's an edited transcript of our chat.

Q: When did you last live in Haiti?

A: I last lived in Haiti in 1981, which was more than 30 years ago. But I go back often, to the same places and to new places in the country, because I still have a lot of family there. I was just there in July, in fact. And there was a time when I was part of a university program that brought college students to Haiti; that's actually how I met my husband, who was living in Miami but traveling to Haiti.

Q: Can you imagine writing a novel that's not set at least partly in Haiti?

A: I'm writing one now, a young adult novel, that's set in Miami, although the characters are Haitian-American. So I can imagine it, yeah.

Q: You have a large Haitian-American community there in Miami, I think.

A: Yes, it's the largest in the United States, probably. It's a mixture of new arrivals, older arrivals, people who have weekend homes here and hop back and forth.

Q: But Haiti is where your imagination lives, so to speak.

A: Yeah, absolutely. In a way, I think, writing about Haiti is a way for me to go back, even when I'm not there. It's where a big chunk of my heart lives. When I first got to the U.S., when I was 12, I would read a lot about Haiti to go back. I read a lot of Haitian literature, more than I had when I was living there. Now, when I write about Haiti, I feel like it's my way of going back.

Q: Of course, there are writers who are from parts of the world similar to Haiti — I'm thinking, for example, of Jamaica Kincaid — who don't write a great deal about where they're from, except in a distanced kind of way.

A: Sure. It depends on the writer, and it depends on your relationship to a place when you left it. As one gets older and one writes more, sometimes you may get a sense that you've exhausted that place as a subject. But I don't feel like I've reached that stage yet, where I've told all the stories about Haiti and about the Haitian diaspora, that I want to tell.

Q: There's a mythic quality to Haiti, as you depict it in "Claire of the Sea Light" and other books, and even your characters seem conscious of that quality.

A: Yes, certainly there's a mythic quality to the way that Haiti was created, to the way the nation came to be. It's the first successful slave revolt in the world, the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere. With that came certain mythic personalities, men and women who are the mothers and the fathers of the country. And then you add to that the deep sense of spirituality, of Vodou — as distinct from voodoo — and later the history of dictatorship, and still later the earthquakes. So Haiti is a small place with big stories. And maybe that's why we have such big art, both in terms of visual art and literature. (Laughs.) There's this big, mythic beginning, but also this almost Sisyphean story of the great struggle that continues, and the people who fight it.

Q: Despite — or maybe in addition to — those mythic qualities, your new novel also has a distinctly contemporary feel. It touches on environmental issues in Haiti, for example, as well as the problem of gangs and the phenomenon of so many small children being sent by their families to be servants in other people's homes.

A: Sure. Part of the contemporary reality in Haiti is having to live up to this great promise of our beginning as a nation. It's also true that I felt I couldn't write about a small town like Ville Rose — which is modeled after the town where my mother grew up — without tackling some of these contemporary issues that small towns and big cities now face in Haiti. The environmental issues are just there, and you can see them happening gradually. And so I show them in this little village, this little microcosm. I think of the reader as a kind of visitor to this little town, kind of like Sherwood Anderson does in "Winesburg, Ohio," which is one of my models for the books. You come to the town, you hear the town gossip, you listen to the radio, and you get a sense of both contemporary situation and the history of Haiti within this little place.

Q: Are there in fact problems in Haiti now of overfishing, land erosion caused by cutting down too many trees, and those issues, as in the book?

A: Oh, absolutely. Because people are forced to cut down trees for charcoal, you have very little tree cover now in Haiti — I think it's under 5 percent for the entire country — which leads to erosion and flooding.

Q: And the matter of the children?

A: Yes, there are a lot of parents who cannot take care of their children — not because they don't love them, but because they can't afford to. So they send the children to another family. If they blend well and if they are among caring people, they become part of the family and are sent to school and all of that. If they don't, they become domestic servants, which is a phenomenon called restavek, which means "stays with."

Q: And Claire, in the book, is aware of this phenomenon — which affects an estimated 300,000 children in Haiti — even though she's only 7 years old. It may be why she runs away.

A: Yeah. Most children her age and in her situation would be aware of it. Children even younger than Claire would be aware. The dilemma for the families who give their children away in this manner is that they have no guarantees that what the person is promising will actually happen. Claire's father is more certain that this lady would not do that to her, but Claire herself is not so sure.

Q: One of the major themes in the book is the idea of communal responsibility. And yet it's easier said than done.

A: Yes, it's easier said than done, especially in an environment of limited resources. The easier impulse is for everybody to just look after their own interests. But what's always been for me phenomenally amazing about Haiti is that when you go into the poorest community — and I grew up in such a community — that's where the people are the most generous.